It's certainly an original approach to make a documentary about an animator in animated form, and Chris Landreth's "through the mirror" concept, which shows us the characters' emotional scars and losses in physical form, is also a nice idea. The quality of the computer rendering and animation is top-notch, among the best I've ever seen, which makes this little film so spectacular to look at.
However, the story is pretty thin: A former successful animator fell on hard times and into drug addictions and is now a social reject. Little more than that. Not exactly unheard of, but it still could make for an interesting real-life documentary if the story was really probed into; but all that Landreth does is state this fact, in a highly pretentious manner, and adorning it with as much visual fancy as possible. And this makes it hard to take the story seriously, even if it's true. We see many secondary characters around the edges of the story, but they add little or nothing to it, and seem to just serve Landreth to show off his visual concepts. In the end, this short didn't have much effect on me, other than keeping me up to date with the state-of-the-art current computer animation capabilities...
However, the story is pretty thin: A former successful animator fell on hard times and into drug addictions and is now a social reject. Little more than that. Not exactly unheard of, but it still could make for an interesting real-life documentary if the story was really probed into; but all that Landreth does is state this fact, in a highly pretentious manner, and adorning it with as much visual fancy as possible. And this makes it hard to take the story seriously, even if it's true. We see many secondary characters around the edges of the story, but they add little or nothing to it, and seem to just serve Landreth to show off his visual concepts. In the end, this short didn't have much effect on me, other than keeping me up to date with the state-of-the-art current computer animation capabilities...